


in the very palm of your hand

by dirgewithoutmusic



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: (But hint : she's both), Before and after Gyonxye, Daja makes beauty, Friendship, Growing Up, Sandry the embroidering political badass, Tris just wants to be a girl and not a storm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 11:14:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5454578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of moments for each of the Emelan kids and for each of their friendships. From age ten, through disasters together and disasters apart, they are a family and they have made a home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the very palm of your hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silberstreif](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silberstreif/gifts).



Sandry & Tris

The night they sent Sandrilene fa Toren to Discipline Cottage, there was a storm. As the dedicate dragged her through the courtyard, a small pine nearby lit up, shattering and blackening under a sudden lightning strike. 

Sandry was alive, unburned, rain soaking into her slippers, so she took in that bright flash and made it into joy inside her chest. "Did you see that?" she exclaimed to the plump, scowling redhead who huddled in on herself in the waiting room the dedicate dragged her into. 

Sandry had been in the dark so long. The light-- it blinded, it hurt the eyes, it _hurt_ \-- but it never occurred to her to be afraid of the light. 

-

Tris & Briar 

At ten, Tris had haggled down grown fishmongers and grocers because she knew what hell would come if she came back with less change than her aunt expected. She'd had to learn by trial and error what her aunt thought fish should cost--it depended on the type, the size, the smell, but it also depended on how well or poorly brewed the morning coffee had been and if her aunt had won the bridge game the night before. 

Briar had been pinching coins since the streets of Hajra-- not just in a hungry spendthrift kind of way, but literally pinching them. He knew how to slip little hands in unwary purses and pockets and pull what he wanted out with careful fingers. 

Sandry had spent her childhood in silks that would have fed Briar's gang for months. Daja had been taught to haggle, to count coins and spend smartly. She was as skilled and practical in the market as they were--but Briar and Tris had learned the value of coin in hunger, in fear. Daja had had hard lessons but never cruel ones. 

But that was not why a ten year old Briar had kept a ten year old Tris from falling off a Winding Circle wall overlooking a pirate fleet. That was not why she brought him a cartload of potted plants while he was stuck in quarantine with a withering Rosethorn. That was not why, in a cold storage room in Namorn, Briar and Tris reopened their connections first with each other. 

It was not that they had both been born to cold homes, to the endless numbing fear of want and hunger. 

Tris had taught him how to read. 

When she saw Evvy's careful pouches of alphabetized stones for the first time, Tris went still. She was suddenly small again, this caustic ex-urchin's age, bending over a slate and some plucked herbs, telling a fidgety, attentive kid that B was for basil, botany, beet...

Briar caught her staring. He raised two cocky eyebrows at her and despite everything, despite years and miles, despite the silence between them, she knew he meant thank you. 

-

Briar & Daja

In the years they lived at Winding Circle, the kids came home bruised often enough that Briar grew sick of the smell of bruise balm. They were peculiar children, odd ones out, orphans and literal outcasts. Tris was chubby and unfriendly and didn't look like the danger she was. Sandry would stick her neb in every bit of bad business she could sniff out. Briar was his own particular brand of contrary. Daja was tall and she carried her staff as protection, but also as announcement-- the she knew who she was. 

When they got into fights with Sandry, the adults knew as soon as they got back-- Sandry was on a crusade and she'd take her own punishment handily if it meant smearing some bullies officially into the dirt. Tris didn't announce such fights, but she came home pale and sulky and angry, and that was easy enough to sniff out. 

But when it was just Briar and Daja-- they left behind bruised ribs and broken fingers and came home calm and smug. Briar patched them up quietly, handily, in his own room and they covered the sharp scent of bruise balm with curried chicken sandwiches. 

-

Daja & Tris

Tris went to the library as often as Briar tried to skidaddle off to Dedicate Gorse's kitchen. Her Niko-assigned reading circled her powers-- disasters, weather, responsibility-- but her foster siblings found other obsessions piled on her bedside table, neatly stacked in the downstairs bookshelf, picked up gingerly after chores. 

Tris read about stars, about scrying, paged through old histories and new psychological theories, and occasionally a good romance (though she tended to pretend she'd brought those home for Lark, and Lark kindly played along). 

Daja came up to bring Tris down for supper one day and found Tris immersed in a book on her lap-- a common sight. But Tris startled, slammed it shut, and slipped it under her pillow. 

"You know we know you read things other than dry dusty academic journals sometimes, don't you?" Daja asked. 

"It's not a--" Tris was bright red from the tip of her long nose to the small ears her spectacles rested unevenly on. 

"I don't care," said Daja, meaning it kindly. 

Tris reddened further then spat out, "It's a linguistics text. Language learning."

"Okay," said Daja. 

Tris's fingers brushed the corner of the book that stuck out from under the embroidered pillow that must have come from Sandry. 

"It's Tradertalk," said Tris. "I wanted to understand."

Daja hesitated. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize you were feeling left out. Sandry and Briar and I, we don't have to..."

"No, I mean-- you called us all _saati_ , once," said Tris. "And Sandry hugged you and Briar tried to look all grown-up and unfazed and you sort of explained it-- but I want to _know_ ," said Tris. Daja moved over and sat on the bed next to her. "I want to understand," Tris went on, softer. "This is your language, your words-- this is yours, and if you say we're family, if we're _saati_ \-- I should understand."

Daja brushed the coverlet with her fingers. This was Lark's work, not Sandry's-- Lark liked to sneak violets into every open corner of embroidery. "Why don't I teach you then?"

Tris blinked at her, then answered, reddening again, "My accent's terrible, I can tell just from listening to myself. No thanks." Her chin firmed. "I don't like being laughed at," said Tris. 

Daja nodded, solemn. "Have you ever seen me laugh at someone for something like that?" As Tris blinked slowly at her, Daja rose and offered a hand. "Think about it. C'mon, let's get downstairs before the boy eats it all."

-

Sandry & Daja

The first thing for Sandry was that Daja sounded like home. 

She'd discover Daja's stubbornness later, her patience ( _uvumi_ ), her wickedest smile. But in the first moment-- a girl in Traders' red mourning stepped into the Winding Circle mess hall, the fiercely blank set of her jaw telling anyone who cared to look that she knew how out of place she was among these skirts. 

Sandry looked, she listened, and she thought _she sounds like home._

-

Briar & Tris

Briar tiptoed out of his room and padded across the common room floor to look for a bedtime snack in Discipline's tidy kitchen. The night was silent-- even the pirates were asleep in this dark hour of the morning, their boom stones not flying until dawn. 

A high cheep trilled through the muffling dark. Briar stepped over a snoring Little Bear and found Tris, asleep at the table, head resting on her folded arms. Her fledgling foundling peeped again, plaintive, and Briar scooped it up before it could wake her. He padded back into the kitchen, murmured, "Snacktime for both of us, then?"

When he'd gotten the fledgling full and warm with the milk and tonic Rosethorn had prescribed to Tris, he put it back in its little padded box, draped a blanket around Tris's shoulders, and went back to bed. 

-

Tris & Daja

Daja couldn't burn. Settling into her second floor room after the earthquake, the pirates, the drowned slaves, settling into this family and this circle, Tris clung to that. 

Daja couldn't burn. Sandry was all thread and silk and rough sturdy cotton, and Tris could imagine all too easily those things lightning-charred. Briar was life, young twigs, paper-thin leaves and petals. The tallest trees called lightning down to scar them dead, and the boy just kept on growing. 

But Daja-- Daja couldn't burn. She shaped things with pounding hammers and sweat. Sandry made things. Briar grew them. Tris-- Tris learned. She read books and cleaned house. Her veins ran with the strength of disasters, calamities, force that dwarfed any mere human. She could walk in storms, hold lightning. When earthquakes came, they made her bones shake before they ever touched the ground under her feet. 

When they went north that first summer, to the dry fire trap of Gold Ridge, Tris found pits of magma to dance in. Daja tried to follow, and she couldn't. 

Daja would never burn, not this solid girl made of good metal and better craftsmanship, but she would melt. 

Tris listened to the magma singing her name, holding her close and warm, and felt unsafe, unsafe, unsafe. 

-

Sandry & Briar

She sewed Briar clothes that didn't rustle when he walked. It was a joke, for her thief boy, a laugh-- but it was also because Briar had a bigger heart than he'd ever admit. He was quite likely never going to rob a house again, but as Sandry watched him and Rosethorn head out at the beginning of their long journey to Chammur, to Yanjing and Gyonxze, to war and back, Sandry knew-- the boy would get himself into trouble, for his own sake, for other people's. 

He'd cover it up with bluff and bluster, but she knew him, the way he was gentle with Tris, the way he loved Little Bear and had once jumped into death itself for Rosethorn. He would jump himself into something new, something dangerous. All she could send with him was a little stealth and silence--a joke, a laugh for her thief boy--a hope that in a moment of fear a bit of silence might be just what he needed. 

Sandry watched them all walk away-- Tris and Niko, off south and south. Daja and Frostpine off to Namorn, where Sandry might have been now if she hadn't, at ten, asked Niko to let her stay near her Uncle Vedris. Briar and Rosethorn, who planned to find new plants, but who found worse things buried in dry soils-- Sandry watched them all walk away. She clung to Lark's hand and she prayed they'd all come back. 

-

Tris & Sandry

On their ship voyages south, in the backs of wagons and in little inn beds, Little Bear crawled up into Tris's lap and fell asleep like he thought he was still puppy-sized. 

Tris carded a hand through his coat while she read with a book propped up by her other hand. The big dog breathed in and out, huffily, and Tris remembered him puppy-sized-- a cobbled alley by an Emelan market, her own smaller hands wrapped around a water bucket, one of the first righteous rages she'd ever seen Sandry in. 

Little Bear snuffled and rolled over a bit, one leg kicking. "That was a good day's work, wasn't it?" she murmured to him, and went back to reading. 

-

Daja & Sandry

In Kugisko, with Frostpine, among all those cold nights and weird tea drinking customs and strange clacking accents, Daja kept recognizing people on the street. 

Golden brown hair coiled under silk veils-- those round cheeks-- that pert nose-- She saw Sandry on the streets in these young Namorese maidens. 

Daja missed her. She wanted her sister-saati here, her good sense and better eye and kind heart. Would Sandry have sniffed out Ben? How many terrible fires earlier would Sandry have seen it? Sandry was good, both effortless and effortful in ways none of her siblings knew how to or cared to be. Would she have taken one look at Ben's sick gaze and seen the evil there?

Daja missed her, every time a round-cheeked girl caught her eyes. 

She missed her. She wanted her here-- but she was glad Sandry wasn't far away. This was a wooden city, going down in smoke house by house. Cloth burns. 

-

Briar & Sandry

Barely back from Gyonxze, imperial boot thuds still sounding in his ears, still checking in on Evvy at least daily, even though she was here, within temple walls, safe (as safe as they'd been up in those old high mountain temples? as safe as the dedicates Briar had seen strewn, floating in a river gone pink and rotten? as safe as--)--

Barely back from Gyonxye, Briar strolled his way up to the Duke's Citadel, hands lazily tucked in his pockets and smiles lazily creasing up his grey-green eyes when he caught pretty young women appreciating him appreciate them. 

He meant to find Sandry, because he was bored and Daja was busy and Tris was grumpy but not grumpy enough to pick any sort of interesting fight with. And he did find her-- at the churning center of a gaggle of pages with messages to deliver, grumpy put-upon merchants with complaints quivering in their high collared shirts, minor administrators, the duke's seneschal himself, a few clerks vying desperately for her signature. She didn't even see him. 

Every line of Sandry's fine gown was perfectly smoothed and behaved-- of course it was, that was her magic. But just as neatly arranged was the way she handled the crowd: her amiable smile, the ways her eyes flicked from face to face, promising attention, her careful hands and soothing answers, the way she knew all their names and all their troubles. 

She sent this merchant on their way, mollified, and this one, even more furious, off to bother someone who deserved it. Clerks got their signatures, the pages all got responses to sprint back in the opposite direction, administrators got answered, or listened to, or directed, depending on the need. 

Sandry finished off the final few who had flocked around her while she was dealing with the first set, and then she let the duke's seneschal drag her away. Briar didn't follow. Sandry had cried, during some of those early fights when they all first came home, that they had abandoned her, left her alone to stay a child while they all went off to have adventures. 

He had nothing like adventures under his belt. He had well-fed gardens in Chammur's rocky heights, and burned ones in Yanjing's imperial palace, and he had nightmares more nights than not. He felt grubby and grimy, watching Sandry's skirts flick around the corner, bright with embroidery she'd done herself. His hands bloomed flowers, curled vines, and Briar turned around and went home. 

-

Daja & Briar

When Daja woke, she wasn't sure what had shaken her awake. The night was starlit still, though there was a faint bluish blush, like hypothermic fingers, suggesting dawn was on its way. The big girl stretched out in the bed she had had specially made just so she could stretch just like this, without hitting the edges. Then she swung her legs over the edge and let her bare feet hit cold ground. 

Her tea was still brewing when she heard a rustle in the garden. She stopped staring sleepily at the curls of color spreading through the steaming mug, grabbed her staff, and stepped outside. 

Briar was pacing the garden wall in his sleep shirt and bare feet, grass stains on the hems of his soft pants. He looked like he fit there, among the roses and pea shoots and apple trees he'd been tending all summer. He had always looked like he fit among green growing things, even as a twitchy, rude thief boy who ate like someone might take the bowl away. 

He was twitching now--the shake of a head, the slide of his hands along the sheath tucked into his waistband. There was a dark triangle of sweat between his shoulder blades. Daja thought she might know what had woken her. 

She made sure to make noise as she stepped out onto the grass. "Hey," she said when his gaze snapped up to her. "Want to spar?"

Her tea was overbrewed when they made it back into the kitchen. Daja filled it with cream and sugar and drank it anyway. 

-

Sandry

Sandry had had to lock off part of herself, when she left Discipline knowing she could never go back for good. 

Sandry had learned Tradertalk and _uvumi_ from her nursemaid, had learned how to see every breath as a new possibility from her parents. When the carriage broke down or a freak hailstorm hit, her mother would laugh. Her father would gather up hailstones when it was all over and dramatically offer them like they were the finest of jewels, and her mother would take them like she agreed. 

(Her parents had taught her how to live footloose, how to survive when you had no place that was yours, no place to hang your hat and rest your bones. You carried everything inside of yourself and you didn't look back.) 

Sandry made her own tapestries to hang up in her room in the Duke's Citadel-- nontraditional creations, all abstract shape and soothing color. She had a neat shelf of books she was too busy to read, sewing projects piled up beside reports and petitions. 

(Her parents hadn't kept home in themselves; they had kept it in each other. That is what love does-- turns hailstones into gifts, open hands into homes; four young strangers into family.)

Sandry had made her room as warm as it could be, but on long days, on hard days, she put on her walking boots and headed down into the city not up into her tapestries and half-done projects. She made her way to the three-storey house on Cheeseman Street, her hood up and her hands in her pockets, and when she got there there was always a pot of tea already steaming. 

-

Daja

Daja spent three days making nails when she got home from Namorn. Everything seemed ugly and overwrought and useless, so she got long rods of heavy metal and got a good fire going and slammed herself into the work. It was practical and rote, but she sold them to a little carpenter's shop down the road and something lifted from her shoulders. 

She moved onto horseshoes next. She hitched up a little portable forge and went from stable to stable to courier to local farm. She liked the walking, the creak of the cart, the ground covered. She liked the big warmth of the horses, the way they shifted and exhaled noisily and nosed at her shirtfront or shied away. She patted sides, left the beasts well-shod, and went home covered in horsehair. 

She broadened out, after that-- went back to her own forge and took commissions. She made door hinges and magical lock boxes and axles and once an wrought iron lily for a gravestone. It was easier to breathe when there was smoke in the air. 

When she plunged hot metal into water at just the right moment, and the hissing steam rose up, and the color of it ebbed and darkened just like it should, Daja felt her shoulders relax. She thought, _yes._ She thought, _that's lovely,_ and it was the first thing she'd thought beautiful since Rizu. It was just going to be a hinge on a shopkeeper's new front door, this piece of steaming metal-- just a hinge, and every time Daja went in and out of his shop, the door swinging ably, she would smile. 

She thought she'd be happy like that for a good long while. Hinges and boxes and nails and horseshoes-- good work, steady work, useful work. Daja liked being useful. She called herself content. She slept heavily in the nights, and didn't smile back when a pretty young woman asked her about her hand in a grocer's shop, and she made buckets and baskets and barrels of good, solid work. 

She was content. She stepped out onto the street, meaning to go down to the shopkeeper's and smile when she stepped through his door, and she saw an older man going down the road with a hitch to his step. He left footprints with his left foot and his peg left little divots in the dirt on his right. He paused by the corner and bent a little to squeeze at the place where peg met living leg, grimacing.

Anyone besides her foster family and Frostpine would have looked at Daja then and seen a young woman with an even stance and a considering expression on her face. But Daja was fizzing somewhere down by her breastbone. She was content, but she had forgotten what it was like to be alight, to want work in her hands-- the way she had felt about Polyam's leg, Ben's gloves, the way Rizu had brushed her arm and Daja had wanted to sit and marvel and build things worthy of her-- she had decided not to want those things. Nails, hinges, horseshoes-- these were enough. They had to be. 

But there was a man grimacing, walking with a hitch to his step, and Daja's hands itched to do something about it. She thought about living metal ligaments and iron supports. She locked the house door behind her and set off in his direction. "Excuse me!" 

-

Briar

When Briar walked down Rosethorn's garden path at Discipline, the bean sprouts still reached out and up and wrapped round and round his fingers and ankles. They still sang in the sun. 

Briar would still see bloodied flotsam whenever a dedicate's robe flashed by the corner of his eye. Rosethorn would always have a slow voice, a slur-- but she was here, breathing, sniping, making good things grow. 

When Briar went to visit Evvy in the mage dorms, he found her sitting in the courtyard, palms flat on the cobblestones, smiling like they were singing in the sun. She didn't see him for long moments-- he settled down onto a bench with a creaking groan (when had he gotten old?) and waited for her attention to return to the world around her. 

The aspen in the courtyard was reaching all her arms and fingers and leaves up to the sky. It had rained in the night and the ground was still damp, probably ruining the butt of Evvy's trousers, but making all the green life around Briar murmur with ecstatic growth. Briar scooted further down on the bench and let his head fall back. 

The aspen was reaching, the ivy quietly blessing every unshadowed inch of itself, the grass warm and glorious and loud about it in a way that reverberated buzzily at the base of Briar's skull. 

Briar closed his eyes and let the sun soak in. 

-

Tris

When Tris moved into her little room on the Lightsbridge campus, she made her bed first, then unpacked her books, then her clothes into drawers, then various other essentials. She felt practical, and adult, and accomplished. 

It was nice, having this quiet little room all to herself. In Daja's house, she would have been hearing Daja creak around the floor below her, or Briar hollering about Chime nibbling on his shakkan. It was nice, the quiet. This was what she wanted. 

There was someone else's name on the lease for this place, on Lightsbridge's academic roster, on the tip of tongue, ready for the lie. Her mage's kit was hidden in her hair. She tried to tell herself none of this was lying, but she couldn't, so she told herself it was worth it. 

The silence pressed in round and round her. The campus was nearly empty because she had come a week early in order to get situated, so she knew the silence went out all around her. It was nice, wasn't it, the quiet? Wasn't this what she had wanted?

Tris sat cross-legged on her stiff mattress-- better than some of the beds she and Niko had slept in on their long journey south, and worse than others. She reached over to grab a book from her desk. 

Books and animals had been her first friends, her longest ones. Books would always open for you, always tell you things. Lonely in this campus she'd been dreaming of for years, uncertain, words seemed like the place to retreat to. 

She opened the book slowly, watching the ways the pages moved against each other. Then she frowned-- a few pages didn't slide, but stuck together. She peeled them apart carefully, scowling as the faint scent of dried raspberry jam filled the air. Then the stuck pages fell open and she recognized Glaki's little fingerprints in the margins. 

Glaki had clung to her knees before she left, had insisted on showing her the fire images and levitation her Winding Circle teachers had been guiding her through. Glaki had grown inches and inches, glowing under Lark's warm care, giggling at Rosethorn's prickles. Her clothes had been warm and sturdy and fit her perfectly-- Sandry's work. 

Daja had plucked her up (Glaki shrieked joyfully) and put her on her tall, broad shoulders to watch Tris and her cart move down the road towards Lightsbridge. Glaki had waved until she was out of sight, and Tris had waved back. 

Briar had been helping with Glaki's reading lessons. Tris poked the sticky page. She'd have to write him a stern letter about this. 

She put a scrap of cloth between the pages to protect them from each other and to remind her to tend to it later. Then she went through her last unpacked box and drew out a rolled cylinder of cloth. 

Tris stood on her bed and hung it from the wall above it. Unfurled, it was a bright embroidered hanging of beautifully plumed birds. Sandry had given it to her, her first night at Discipline, and not expected anything back. 

The name on the lease of this place was a lie, but this wasn't-- Sandry's stitchery and Glaki's fingerprints were all over this room. Lark had made this coverlet, snuck lilac blooms into empty corners of the embroidery, and Chime was sleeping curled at the foot of it. Rosethorn and Briar had sent Tris off with a box of their best headache teas and bruise balms, and Daja's first letter had already arrived, heavy with talk of her latest living metal creation and news of Zhegorz. The center of one of Tris's palms was shiny, scarred, marked. 

Tris adjusted the hanging so that it lay straight, then stepped off the bed and grabbed her coat and shoes. Maybe the libraries were open. The quiet-- the quiet would be _nice_ , she thought, and she believed it. 


End file.
